Hong Kong’s wealth gap has widened over the past few years amid surging real-estate prices and as the city’s outgoing leader grapples with a tide of public resentment over a spate of scandals involving top officials and billionaire tycoons.
Around a tenth of families in the territory of 7 million people live in relative poverty, Oxfam said. The wealth gap stands now among the widest of any developed Asian economy.
The Gini coefficient for all households in Hong Kong was 0.537 last year, up from 0.533 in 2006, in the latest five-year figure for income disparity released yesterday.
Some groups have blamed the failure of outgoing Chief Executive Donald Tsang (曾蔭權) to provide greater support for the underprivileged and for housing policies that have coddled the territory’s powerful property tycoons.
A major corruption probe into a top former official and the billionaire Kwok brothers who run property developer Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd (新鴻基地產), along with lavish overseas duty trips by Tsang, have not helped perceptions of overly cozy government-business ties.
The government said it had addressed poverty alleviation, including enacting a minimum wage last year, and stressed an adjusted Gini coefficient figure taking into account taxes and social benefits, had in fact remained unchanged since 2006.
Hong Kong’s incoming leader, the Beijing-backed Leung Chun-ying (梁振英), has pledged to accelerate public housing development from the current 15,000 units a year and said he plans to revive an anti-poverty commission that was dismantled in 2007.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained